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I used to like Win 8, but now I really like 8.1, and am sure to find the next update an incremental improvement. I'll even wager that I'll love the OS so much by the time 9 is released, that I'll be utterly disgusted that the laptop replacing this one comes with 9.

Telos:In other words "it's different so it's bad, I want the exact same thing as before. Change is bad." Sorry, but the old start menu sucked horribly. The new start menu (aka Metro Desktop) is much better in that you don't have to sort through tiny folders to find what you want, and even if you don't see it you can type to search.

Yah because having all 18 of Office's stupid little obscure apps along with every other executable in one gigantic unsorted tile set resembling an detonated skittle bag is so great. The superior Start Menu from 7 had a self learning 'commonly used' section front and center and then an organized tree to hold all those bullshiat apps you use once a century, and it also featured a search by typing right there as well. Sure Metro would be okay for people who barely scratch the capabilities of a computer, but anyone doing any real amount of work on a system has enough apps installed that the flat sprawl gets hideous.

Oh, and I'm sorry, Windoze was NEVER a good operating system. Hell, it wasn't even an operating system until NT, it was just a MS-DOS overlay before that. And for most of you, it wasn't even an OS before XP, since you probably had 98 before that, which was really just still an overlay on MS-DOS.

The first release that wasn't a complete steaming pile of dogshiat was 7. It was still shiat, but it had time to cool down and didn't stink as badly.

Windoze 8 is freshly dropped and steaming again, with a runny diarrhea quality added to it.

At least I don't have to use that turd. I've been using Macs on the desktop and in the server room since the late '80s, and Apple IIs before that, with some Linux servers quietly crunching away in the racks these days too.

Carn:LineNoise: Carn: Win+r mstsc. I think it still has the old run, need to verify on other machine.

Oh, yea, I know, like I said there are plenty of ways of doing it, but they defeat the point of the whole new UI when you want the default behavior of an app to work differently than it does out of the box (even when its an app that would make sense to default a different way).

I think they will get it right with some polish, but the point is in here. It isn't that the windows 8 UI is bad. Most of the examples people tout out are outright wrong, or, like me, they just need to spend 5 minutes to figure out how you do something the new way vs how it worked in 7, and people don't want to do that.

If you are someone who runs office, a browser, and a couple of games, the start menu is fine for you, and I get that. But if you suddenly have a brazillion apps on your desktop, which is what happens when you introduce the app store and the like, it starts getting to be a clunky way of organizing stuff. Tiles and a robust search make sense. They just need to figure out a middle ground of sorts

Yeah I'm with you, on my home machine I can avoid running widgets thankfully so the couple of times I had to switch between them I was only horribly annoyed for a few seconds. I run vms at work and always have multiple terminal sessions like you so we'll see how enraged this will make me on a daily basis. I'm not sure MS will ever get it 100% right. Win7 was pretty close. The biggest annoyance when it first came out was how intrusive the User Access Control box was. Every time you did anything "is this ok is that ok can I rub your back?" which they toned down after the service packs. Now they tried to help their non-existent mobile share but cocking up the desktop user experience. You'd think they would have learned this lesson already with all of the major OS failures they've had but whatever. I guess the safe bet will always be not to get any Microsoft product until sp1, maybe ...

VMS?!??!!!???

I didn't think ANYBODY still had a VAX running. The last one I knew of was shut down about 5 years ago.

Marine1:What I don't get is the idea of constantly kowtowing down to the lowest common denominator in everything related to software design even when it means not advancing a product in a meaningful way to take advantage of the most recent innovations in the field.

I don't get a couple of things:

1) Why you're white knighting Microsoft when they themselves have admitted their farkup. They aren't going to sleep with you.2) Why you don't seem to have any clue that a design is to promote usability, not complexity. What was it do you think was broken about the previous Windows UI that Metro "fixed"?

So this will be another thread where people will come in and tell everyone how if you don't like the Metro UI, you're a dinosaur who deserves to be put down? Oh good...we haven't had one of those in at least a day and a half.

I actually enjoy the Metro UI on my Surface Pro (purchased at a crazy low price because no one is buying them). On my desktop PC, not so much. This update sounds like it...well...almost does what Classic Shell does already for me. I'm guessing the people who run Microsoft these days are so far removed from every day work and computing that they have no friggin' clue what the average user does. It's like they watched a few kids playing with an iPad at Starbucks and said, "My god, that's what EVERYONE who uses a computer wants now!" Uh, no. It's not. Especially not the business computing community, which is vastly larger than the entertainment computing market.

There are like one trillion tech products with that name. I assume you mean the Linux one? Not the game engine, or development tool, right?

I'm guessing so, Unity the game engine is pretty spiffy. Unity the Metro of Linux UIs is certainly not, in fact among my circle of co-workers and friends its the single driving force that's making us migrate away from Ubuntu since they seem to have locked their jaws onto that and several other unwanted features.